EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Using Genetic Algorithms for Rapid Speaker Adaptation

Fabrice Lauri, Irina Illina, Dominique Fohr, Filipp Korkmazsky

LORIA, France

This paper proposes two new approaches to rapid speaker adaptation of acoustic models by using genetic algorithms. Whereas conventional speaker adaptation techniques yield adapted models which represent local optimum solutions, genetic algorithms are capable to provide multiple optimal solutions, thereby delivering potentially more robust adapted models. We have investigated two different strategies of application of the genetic algorithm in the framework of speaker adaptation of acoustic models. The first approach ( GA) consists in using a genetic algorithm to adapt the set of Gaussian means to a new speaker. The second approach ( GA + EV) uses the genetic algorithm to enrich the set of speaker-dependant systems employed by the EigenVoices. Experiments with the Resource Management corpus show that, with one adaptation utterance, GA can improve the performances of a speaker-independent system as efficiently as EigenVoices. The method GA + EV outperforms EigenVoices.

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Bibliographic reference.  Lauri, Fabrice / Illina, Irina / Fohr, Dominique / Korkmazsky, Filipp (2003): "Using genetic algorithms for rapid speaker adaptation", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1497-1500.